Romney Faces Stubborn Question, Despite Victories

Mitt Romney was introduced by his wife, Ann, before giving his victory speech in Novi, Mich., after winning the Michigan and Arizona primaries.Credit
Yana Paskova for The New York Times

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. — After 5 caucuses, 6 primaries, 20 debates and $30 million in television commercials, Mitt Romney leaves here facing the same stubborn question: Can a onetime Northeastern governor with a history of ideological migration win the Republican presidential nomination in the era of the Tea Party, with all its demands of political purity and passion?

Mr. Romney’s victory here, in the state where he was born and raised, should help him quiet some of the anxiety in the party about his strength as a candidate. But Rick Santorum, in their sometimes vitriolic head-to-head matchup, exposed once again Mr. Romney’s weakness among social conservatives, making the kinds of fervent appeals to evangelicals that Mr. Romney, a onetime supporter of abortion rights, could not and, he suggested on Tuesday, would not.

“I’m not willing to light my hair on fire to try to get support,” Mr. Romney said.

Mr. Romney chose Michigan nearly a year ago to deliver a speech in which he tried to inoculate himself against criticism that his Massachusetts health care law was the model for the national overhaul pushed by President Obama. But the issue continued to dog him in the primary campaign, undercutting his support among small-government Tea Party supporters.

“Why would we nominate someone who is uniquely unqualified to take on the biggest issues of the day in this election?” Mr. Santorum asked a gathering of conservatives near here last week.

In a region that was hit especially hard by the economic downturn, the main rationale for Mr. Romney’s hoped-for general election candidacy against Mr. Obama — that his business acumen is desperately needed to fix the economy — began to show pressure cracks amid signs of job growth and returning corporate profits. As Michigan and Arizona voters went to the polls on Tuesday, the Dow Jones industrial average closed above 13,000 for the first time since 2008.

Mr. Romney’s victories on Tuesday over Mr. Santorum in Michigan and Arizona, after a triple-loss three weeks ago in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, showed once again that when his back is against the wall, he and his muscular campaign operation can find a way to win. He remains his party’s most plausible nominee and benefits from an experienced organization and deep-pocketed backers.

But he continues to face questions about whether, should he win the nomination, he will be able to capture the energy of the conservative constituencies that have propelled the party when it has had electoral success in recent years, especially evangelicals and the Tea Party movement.

“It does seem that his campaign is having a tough time sort of garnering that — not just that support, but that energy that’s needed,” former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, a favorite of the movement, said in an interview late Tuesday. “Whether Romney wins or loses in Michigan tonight, just the fact that he’s had such a fight in his home state is evidence of that blessing not yet being given to him across the board.”

Ms. Palin said that if Mr. Romney became the nominee she would support him “100 percent,” but that he still had considerable work to do to get important portions of the party base on his side. Particularly important, she said, are “those that are part of that Tea Party grass-roots movement,” who “really get offended when the establishment of either party tries to anoint the candidate.”

With his victories Tuesday, Mr. Romney increased his early lead where it matters most in the nominating fight — in delegates.

But he heads into Super Tuesday next week — when 10 states, including Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia, will hold contests — with his vulnerabilities more exposed to the political elements than they have been so far. And his rivals, chief among them Mr. Santorum and also Newt Gingrich, are promising to press very strong challenges in nearly all of those states.

Mr. Romney’s unforced errors here threatened to turn his appeal as a seasoned and successful chief executive against him by allowing his critics and opponents to portray him instead as an out-of-touch capitalist far removed from the deep concerns of the middle class.

They quickly seized on his statements that his wife owned two Cadillacs and that some of his close friends owned Nascar teams.

By contrast, Mr. Santorum has successfully played up his own working-class credentials, something he is planning to do with more focus in coming battlegrounds like Ohio. As Foster S. Friess, who has donated heavily to the “super PAC” supporting Mr. Santorum, said in an e-mail on Tuesday, Mr. Santorum is “a coal miner’s grandson to boot.”

But Mr. Santorum has been able to press a still more aggressive case that Mr. Romney has ceded the Tea Party’s antigovernment position through his health care plan, among other policies he pushed while governor of Massachusetts. “Santorum has done a good job in pointing out that Achilles’ heel in Romneycare,” Ms. Palin said.

And Mr. Santorum has cast the contest with Mr. Romney as a choice between going along to get along and sticking to the principles that helped the Republicans win last November.

“We don’t need a Pyrrhic victory,” he told the conservative group Americans for Prosperity last week. “Every time we’ve nominated a moderate, we’ve lost. Every time we’ve nominated a conservative — a complete conservative on all of the issues, by the way — we’ve won.”

Yet there are those conservatives who view Mr. Romney as plenty conservative enough and are eager to move on to the battle to defeat Mr. Obama, with Mr. Romney as the nominee.

“Frankly, the candidates are so close ideologically, I just think that we’re losing sight of the huge gulf between our candidates and Obama,” said James Bopp Jr., a conservative lawyer and party official in Indiana who supports Mr. Romney. “We’re suffering from the ‘grass is always greener’ syndrome.”

For his part, Mr. Romney appeared stoic on Tuesday as he worked out in a hotel gym here in the early afternoon, telling a reporter who was exercising nearby that he was planning for a long night — which is likely to be followed by several more before the party has a nominee.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on February 29, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Amid Victory, Echo of Doubt. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe